Tuesday, 8 December 2009

Day 4

After faffing around for far too long in the morning, we left rather late – nearly 11:30! We headed for our halfway point, Kolding, and then onto Frederica our hostel stop for the night.

Setting off it quickly became clear that the terrain would be substantially more hilly than yesterday – or as hilly as it’s possible to get in Denmark. Lucy’s knee continued to hurt, so we attempted to find a bag of frozen peas, as this had eased the pain previously. Instead we settled for frozen raspberries and Lucy cycled for the day around Denmark with a bag of frozen raspberries strapped to her knee. That rationale here was that raspberries are more tasty to eat once defrosted – waste not, want not and everything!

Once in Kolding we had one of the best cups of hot chocolate any of us had ever tasted, and Ben brought new pedals, as one of his seized up almost completely, and his attempts to fix it had previously failed.

We carried on through the southeastern side of Jutland, lost track of the cycle route and spent far longer on a busy main road than any of us had really wanted to, and went up and down some actually quite interesting terrain. We discovered the real knack of dealing with hills, which is to build up as much momentum as possible prior to hitting it, and then quickly switch the gears down as we power up the hill. The hills are so small in Denmark that by the time you’ve done all that, you’re practically at the top already.

Arriving in Frederica, we had one of the weirdest coincidences of the trip when we met Mads, the kind man who is offering to put us up tomorrow night at Odensee in the supermarket while we bought our supper. (http://www.couchsurfing.org/)

We arrived at the nearly deserted, but thoroughly gorgeous and very modern hostel at around 6:30, cooked a very tasty vegetable stew, drank some wine, marveled at the vending machines which dispensed beer, wrote this blog and then went to bed! http://www.hihostels.com/dba/hostels-Fredericia-016037.en.htm